Saturday, April 30, 2016

The Egyptian government should legalize independent trade unions, Human
Rights Watch said today, on International Workers’ Day. Egypt
should also end the decades-old single official union system and allow
free and fair elections to union boards for the first time since the
country’s 2011 uprising.

Egypt’s 1976 Trade Union Law does not recognize any trade unions
except the official government-controlled unions affiliated with the
Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF). Independent trade unions
proliferated after the 2011 uprising, but the government has not
officially recognized them, even though the 2014 constitution guarantees
freedom of association.

“Egypt’s government is ignoring the basic right of workers to organize independently,” said Nadim Houry,
deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “The government seems
intent on stifling the freedom Egypt’s labor movement only gained after
years of struggle that culminated in the 2011 uprising.”

The government has announced its intention to propose a new trade union
law, but no final draft has been made public. The failure of successive
governments to amend the Trade Union Law, as well as recent decisions
by the cabinet and Interior Ministry to stop dealing with the de-facto
independent unions, have led labor activists to fear that labor rights
gains since 2011 are facing erosion.

According to activists, once Manpower Minister Gamal Sorour took
office in September 2015, no new independent unions have been able to
register. Activists also expressed fears that members of independent
unions might face prosecution after an official newspaper on April 17,
2016, said that an investigation is being conducted that could lead to
charges against leaders and members of these unions.

On April 8, the director general of the International Labour
Organization (ILO,) Guy Ryder, condemned Egypt’s refusal to recognize
independent unions and said that its refusal “prohibits collective bargaining and exposes union leaders to the risk of dismissal and arrest.”

Ryder also asked the Egyptian government to “expeditiously clarify
all the facts” surrounding the death of Giulio Regeni, an Italian PhD
student who researched independent unions and other workers’ issues in
Egypt. Regeni was found dead on February 4, 2016, after last being seen
in Cairo on January 25, amid a heavy police presence accompanying the
fifth anniversary of the 2011 uprising against former President Hosni
Mubarak.

On March 1, 2016, local news websites reported
that the Interior Ministry had issued an internal decision to no longer
accept documents stamped by independent unions. The ministry stated
that the decision came after recommendations from its National Security
Agency.

On March 8, lawyers for the General Union for Professionals,
Technicians and Artisans filed a lawsuit challenging the decision.

The Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS), one of
Egypt’s oldest independent groups advocating workers’ rights, said the
prime minister issued a memo
in November 2015, ordering ministries to cooperate only with the
Egyptian Trade Union Federation. The directive stated that this was
meant to help take action “against independent unions and instigators,”
the center said.

Kamal Abbas, the head of the center and a member of the National
Council for Human Rights, told Human Rights Watch that the Interior
Ministry’s March 1 decision was unconstitutional. He said that workers
need a stamped document from their union to be able to obtain various
government documents and that this decision would force workers to
belong to an official union.

Egypt’s 2014 constitution states in article 13 that the government
“shall protect workers’ rights and strive to build balanced work
relationships between both parties to the production process. It shall
ensure means for collective negotiations.” Article 76 guarantees the
right to form independent syndicates and unions.

Egypt is a state party to the International Covenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights, which establishes the right to strike as
well as the right to form and join trade unions and national and
international confederations.

Egypt is also a member of the ILO and has ratified all of its eight fundamental conventions,
including convention 87 of 1948 on freedom of association and
convention 98 of 1949 on the right to organize.

Convention 87 states
that workers have the right to establish and, subject only to the rules
of the organization concerned, to join organizations of their own
choosing without previous authorization.

“Protecting workers’ rights to independently organize is a basic
right, not a luxury,” Houry said. “Egypt needs economic development for
all, but such development doesn’t come with oppressing workers.”

DEVELOPMENTS CONCERNING TRADE UNIONS

Egypt created the Egyptian Trade Union Federation, a
government-controlled trade union framework, in the 1950s as an
extension of the state. Between 2008 and the 2011 uprising, workers
tried to establish independent trade unions, but the Manpower Ministry
rejected their articles of association.

Independent unions proliferated after the January 2011 uprising.
Ahmed al-Borie, who was appointed as manpower minister in 2011,
presented the “Declaration of Union Freedoms” in March 2011, which was meant to pave the way to remove legal restrictions on workers’ right to organize.

After al-Borie’s declaration, the independent unions gained partial
government recognition, which allowed them to register. Al-Borie also
prepared a draft law that labor activists described as the most
progressive of those proposed since January 2011.

Successive governments prepared at least two other draft laws since then but none was adopted.

Human Rights Watch received a copy of the latest available draft
trade union law that the government prepared under former Manpower
Minister Nahed al-Ashry between 2014 and 2015. The draft law would end
the single union system but restrict organizations’ rights in other
ways, such as punishing with prison time those who establish unions
without approval.

The governments’ and parliaments’ failure to amend restrictive laws made it easy for the authorities to increasingly erode
these limited concessions. For example, independent unions that were
able to register cannot deduct dues from members’ salaries, and their
members have not usually been allowed to serve as workers’
representatives on national councils or in negotiations with business
owners.

The 1976 Trade Union Law permits only officially recognized unions
to operate. The law established the trade union federation, a single
pyramidal government-controlled entity with 24 officially recognized
general unions.

The law originally established 21 general unions and gave the
government and the federation absolute control over the establishment of
new unions. Since its issuance, the federation has approved only three
more unions, the most recent of which was the Tax, Customs and Finance General Union in 2010.

According to activists, its establishment was a step to undermine
anti-government mobilization, including large sit-ins, organized by
workers who had been trying to establish an independent union for Real Estate Tax Authority workers.

The government dissolved the boards of the federation and several official unions in August 2011, following multiple court decisions
ruling the previous board elections, in 2006, illegal based on a lack
of judicial supervision.

But successive Egyptian governments have not
allowed new elections and have kept in place unelected boards appointed
by various manpower ministers.

In November 2012, then-President Mohamed Morsy, who was ousted by the military in July 2013, postponed
federation and general unions’ elections for six months, ordered the
retirement of union leaders over age 60, and gave the manpower minister
the authority to choose new leaders for the vacated or otherwise
unoccupied seats.

On May 30, 2013, Morsy decreed a one-year extension of
the appointed leadership. In May 2015, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi postponed the union board elections again and extended the current boards’ term for one year.

Following Morsy’s removal by the military, the authorities found
themselves with more leeway to crack down on independent unions amid a
broader stifling of dissent, said a workers’ rights researcher at the
Egyptian Center for Social and Economic Rights, an independent group.

On February 4, 2016, Gamal Sorour, who was appointed manpower minister after al-Ashry, said in an interview with the privately owned newspaper al-Masry al-Youm that he would draft a new trade union law that would not recognize independent unions.

Sorour was replaced by Mohamed Safaan, a federation board member, in
a cabinet reshuffle on March 23. Safaan then declined to meet with a
delegation representing independent unions, said Abbas, the Center for
Trade Union and Workers’ Services head. Safaan said that he could “only
meet with them as individual workers but not as representatives of
entities that he did not acknowledge,” Abbas told Human Rights Watch.

The privately owned newspaper el-Watan reported on February 11, that the head of the federation, Gebaly al-Maraghy, who is also a member of parliament, said
that a federation “legislative committee” had prepared a new draft law
that would dissolve all independent unions and sent it to the
government, which would send it to parliament in “a matter of weeks.” On
April 23, al- Maraghy was elected head of parliament’s Manpower
Committee.

Federation board members, including al-Maraghy, have spoken publicly against independent unions and opposed legalizing them, saying
it would harm the economy and foster instability. Recently, the head of
the official Union of Tax, Finance and Customs Workers, an affiliate of
the federation, filed suit before the Administrative Court, which rules
on the legality of government actions, demanding the dissolution of
independent unions. The court said it would issue its verdict on June 26.

Abbas said he believes the government’s escalation might include arrests and prosecutions. The government-owned newspaper al-Ahramreported
on April 17, that the Social Solidarity and Manpower Ministries were
looking into the funds of independent unions after “monitoring
communications between theses unions and foreign international
organizations aiming at instigating workers’ protests.”

The Front to Defend Egyptian Protesters published a report on Thursday, documenting 1,277 arrests and detentions between April 15 and 27, the period coinciding with popular mobilizations against Egyptian authorities prompted by the transfer of Tiran and Sanafir islands to Saudi Arabia.

The
list issued by the front documents cases spanning across 22 Egyptian
cities wherein 577 individuals have been referred to the prosecution and
619 have been released. The legal status of 81 cases is unclear,
according to the front's lawyers.

Those arrested are predominately men and include 52 minors.

Yasser
Azzam, who was arrested in Dokki on April 25, was released on Thursday
from a Central Security Forces camp. He told Mada Masr that he was kept
in a 12-square-meter cell with another 40 inmates. The men were forced
to sleep on the floor, as the camp authorities did not provide beds or
mattresses.

"We demanded to go to the bathroom, so Central
Security Forces came to our cells trying to scare us. But we continued
protesting until they let us use the bathroom," Azzam said.

While
in detention, Azzam states he was asked about his opinion on "the
January 25 revolution, the June 30 events, President Abdel Fattah
al-Sisi and the government’s performance."

Fatemah Serag, a lawyer
and member of the front, notes that wide ranging suspicion led to the
high number of arbitrary arrests from places far from demonstration
sites and the subsequent release of 60 percent of those arrested.

Other lawyers have criticized the prosecution’s handling of arrests and referrals to investigation.

Lawyer
Yasmine Hossam Eddin told Mada Masr that the prosecution issued "false
visit permits" to family members of those arrested on April 15 and that
are currently being detained in the Tora prison.

"In the Agouza
Police Station [where some protesters have been detained], I saw how
prosecutors were screaming at arrested youth as though they were
policemen and not investigators," Hossam Eddin said.

Lawyer Ahmad
Othman told Mada Masr that prosecutors present at the Agouza Police
Station and the Dokki Police Station did not intervene when police
officers prevented defense lawyers from attending detainee’s
interrogation sessions.

"The prosecution also refused to record
how those arrested were held longer than the 24-hour legal period
between their arrests and referral to investigation. It also refused to
record how arrest warrants were issued after the detainees were in fact
arrested...[and] to record the fact that National Security Agency
members interrogated those arrested before they were referred to
prosecution," Othman stated.

The prosecution has also refused
lawyer’s requests to record incidents of torture that occurred in
detention centers, lawyer Sameh Samir told Mada Masr. "We don't want the
prosecutors to do anything beyond recording these facts in the cases
files," he said.

Prosecutors have also often interrogated
detainees inside police stations where they have faced torture, a
practice contested by lawyers. While it is not illegal to conduct
interrogations there, lawyers state that the non-neutral setting is
inappropriate for the legal process.

"There is almost an agreement
that the prosecution is not a neutral player in human rights cases,"
says Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression lawyer Hassan
al-Azhari.

Azhari called for lawyers to protest the prosecution’s
actions by boycotting interrogations in an attempt to showcase the
process’s lack of credibility.

During the reign of ousted
President Hosni Mubarak, police officers and state security officers
were often hired as prosecutors. The practice is widely contended to be
the reason for the prosecutor’s lack of independence from the executive
branch.

Amid
growing hostility to media criticism of President Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi’s government, Egypt has fallen one place in the 2016 World Press
Freedom Index that Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published today.

The
Egyptian media environment is dynamic and the media reflect the
country’s polarization between support for Sisi and opposition, but the
authoritarian regime has used the fraught security situation to crack
down on critical journalists in the name of stability and national
security.

Now ranked 159th out of 180 countries, Egypt had fallen steadily in
the Index since the end of the Mubarak era, when it was ranked 127th out
of 173 countries. Under President Mohammed Morsi, Egypt was ranked
158th of 178 countries in 2012 and 2013.

With more than 20 journalists currently detained on trumped-up
charges, Egypt is now one of the world’s biggest prisons for media
personnel although, in an interview for CNN last September, President Sisi claimed that his country’s journalists enjoyed “unprecedented” freedom of expression.

A few days before the interview, Sisi pardoned two Al-Jazeera
journalists who had been sentenced to three years in prison in August
2015 after being convicted, at the end of a second trial, of supporting
terrorism, spreading false news and working without permission.

Some journalists have been held provisionally for extremely long periods without seeing a judge.

They include Mahmoud Abou Zeid,
a photographer also known as Shawkan, who was arrested while covering
the eviction of deposed President Morsi’s supporters from Cairo’s Rabaa
Al-Adawiya Square in August 2013.

He was due to go on trial along with more than 700 other defendants
in December 2015, but the start of the trial was postponed until March.
According to the relatives of detained journalists, some have been badly
tortured in prison while others have been denied adequate medical care
although very ill.

Journalists who criticize Sisi or his government are liable to be
harassed, fired or even jailed. And in response to Jihadi violence in
the Sinai Peninsula, the government has imposed “correct” media coverage
of armed attacks and bombings.

After creating a “Fact check Egypt” unit in June 2015 to verify media
reports and point out (alleged) mistakes, the government went one step
further in the anti-terrorism law adopted in August. Under article 33,
the media are now obliged to limit themselves to the government’s
version of terrorist attacks. Reporters who fail to comply can be fined
the equivalent of more than a year’s salary.

Published annually by RSF since 2002, the World Press Freedom Index
measures the level of freedom available to journalists in 180 countries
using the following criteria – pluralism, media independence, media
environment and self-censorship, legislative environment, transparency,
infrastructure, and abuses.

Thousands of
Egyptians angered by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's decision to hand
over two islands to Saudi Arabia called on Friday for the government to
fall, chanting a slogan from the 2011 Arab Spring uprising.

Their
protests signaled that the former general, who is also under mounting
criticism over the struggling economy, no longer enjoys the broad public
support that let him round up thousands of opponents after he seized
power in 2013.
In the evening, riot
police who had surrounded the site of the biggest demonstration, in the
heart of downtown Cairo, dispersed the crowd with tear gas, Reuters
witnesses said.
Egyptian security forces detained a total of 119 protesters at several demonstrations, according to security officials.
Sisi's
government prompted an outcry in Egyptian newspapers and on social
media last week when it announced an accord that put the uninhabited Red
Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir in Saudi waters.

"The
people want the downfall of the regime!" protesters cried outside the
Cairo press syndicate, using the signature chant of the 2011 revolt
against then-president Hosni Mubarak, who later stepped down.

They
also chanted: "Sisi - Mubarak", "We don't want you, leave" and "We own
the land and you are agents who sold our land." In other parts of Cairo,
police fired tear gas at protesters, security sources said.
The
U.S. government, which sees Cairo as a critical Middle East ally, will
continue to watch carefully the situation in Egypt, the White House
said.
Saudi and Egyptian officials
say the islands belong to the kingdom across the Red Sea and were only
under Egyptian control because Riyadh had asked Cairo in 1950 to protect
them.
Saudi Arabia and other
wealthy Gulf Arab states showered Egypt with billions of dollars in aid
and grants after Sisi toppled President Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim
Brotherhood in 2013, following mass protests against him.

But a sharp drop in oil prices and differences
with Cairo over such regional issues as the war in Yemen have raised
questions over whether strong Gulf Arab support can be sustained.MISHANDLED CRISES

Egyptians
are eager for an economic revival after years of political upheaval.
But the islands issue seems to have hurt their national pride, prompting
thousands to return to the streets to confront their leader.
There
are no signs that Sisi's rule is under immediate threat. However, even
local media, which once suggested he could do no wrong, have been
attacking the president.

Critics say the
government has mishandled a series of crises, from an investigation into
the killing of Italian graduate student Giulio Regeni, 28, in Cairo, to
a bomb that brought down a Russian airliner in the Sinai Peninsula last
October.

Torture marks on Regini's
body prompted human rights groups to conclude he died at the hands of
security forces, which Egypt denies. That revived complaints of police
brutality, one of the issues that led Egyptians to challenge Mubarak's
30-year rule.
Sisi has made
fighting corruption a top priority. But he drew fire last month after
sacking Hesham Geneina, Egypt's top auditor, who had stirred controversy
by publicly concluding that state corruption had cost the country
billions of dollars.
In a tweet, Geneina described the protests as the "purest, bravest and most noble demonstration of Egyptians" in decades.
Many
Egyptians enthusiastically welcomed Sisi when he took over. They turned
a blind eye as Islamists and other opponents were rounded up, swelling
the number of political prisoners to about 40,000, according to
estimates by human rights groups.

PATIENCE WITH SISI FADING

A
growing number are now losing patience over corruption, poverty and
unemployment, the same issues that led to Mubarak's downfall, while Sisi
has appeared increasingly authoritarian in televised speeches.
"We
want the downfall of the regime," said Abdelrahman Abdellatif, 29, an
air conditioning engineer, at the Cairo protest. "The youth of the
revolution are still here ... We are experiencing unprecedented fascism
and dictatorship."

There were also Sisi supporters, including a woman wearing a shirt with an image of the former military intelligence chief.
In
Alexandria, around 500 people gathered near a railway station.
Meanwhile, 300 Sisi supporters holding up photographs of him
demonstrated outside a mosque in the port city.
Calls
for protests have gathered thousands of supporters on Facebook,
including from the outlawed Brotherhood, which accused Sisi of staging a
coup when it was ousted and rolling back freedoms won after hundreds of
thousands of Egyptians protested five years ago in Cairo's Tahrir
Square against Mubarak.

Military courts have tried at least 7,420 Egyptian civilians since October 2014, when President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi decreed a major new law that expanded military court jurisdiction.

A list of civilians tried in military courts, provided by the Egyptian
Coordination for Rights and Freedoms, an independent legal and human
rights group, documents for the first time the extent to which al-Sisi’s
administration has used the military justice system to expedite its
harsh crackdown on opponents.

Most defendants were sentenced after mass trials that violate
fundamental due process rights, and some courts relied on confessions
extracted under torture, relatives of the defendants said.

“Apparently unsatisfied with tens of thousands already detained and
speedy mass trials that discarded due process in the name of national
security, al-Sisi essentially gave free rein to military prosecutors,”
said Nadim Houry,
deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “He has handed back to
the military judiciary the powerful role it enjoyed in the months after
Egypt’s uprising, when the nation was governed by a council of
generals.”

The list provided to Human Rights Watch documented 324 cases,
identifying defendants by name, sex, home governorate, and case number,
and in many cases by profession and age. The largest case involved 327
defendants.

The list did not describe the charges in each case. But a Human
Rights Watch survey of about 50 Egyptian media reports since October
2014, describing the referrals of thousands of people for military
trials, indicates that most of those charged in military courts were
transferred there because the broad provisions of al-Sisi’s law
essentially put all public property under military jurisdiction, not
because they committed crimes involving the armed forces.

The media reports indicated that a large number were accused of
participating in illegal or violent protests, as well as membership in
or support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Since July 2013, when the
military removed Mohamed Morsy, Egypt’s first freely elected president
and a former Brotherhood member, Egyptian judges have sentenced
thousands of members of the group.

These military trials have swept up at least 86 children, as well as
students, professors, and activists, including individuals who were
forcibly disappeared and allegedly tortured. Military courts have handed
down 21 death sentences since October 2014, though a lawyer with the
Egyptian Coordination for Rights and Freedoms said that none have yet
been approved by the Supreme Military Court of Appeals.

In May 2015, six men were hanged following verdicts handed down by a military court in August 2014, despite evidence that some had been in detention at the time of their alleged crimes.

Human Rights Watch interviewed relatives of seven people, including
four men sentenced to death and one child, who were all tried in
military courts in the past year. Six told their families that agents of
the Interior Ministry’s National Security branch tortured or beat them
to elicit confessions, including four who were tortured with electric
shocks. Five said they were forcibly disappeared by the authorities for
weeks or months. In all but one case, their convictions were based in
large part on the confessions, according to their relatives and case
files.

In one case, following a mass trial of 27 defendants, a military
court sentenced Seif al-Islam Osama, who was 15 when arrested, to three
years in a juvenile detention facility for allegedly participating in an
illegal protest, despite defense lawyers’ arguments that he was too
young to face military trial and had not actually been a participant.

In another case, a high school
student arrested in the street outside his school told his mother that National Security agents stripped him, walked on him, extinguished
cigarettes on his skin, and gave him electric shocks on various parts of
his body, including his genitals, to make him confess to belonging to a
“terrorist cell” that planted explosives and burned electricity
stations. A military court sentenced him to three years in prison.

Thousands of civilians were retroactively referred to military
trials for crimes they allegedly committed before al-Sisi imposed the
law. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, of the civilians referred for
military trial faced charges that stemmed from the violent unrest that
broke out in mid-2013 after the military removed Morsy from power.

The list identified 1,468 defendants from Minya governorate – the
most from any one governorate – where violent mobs attacked churches and
Christian-owned homes and businesses following Morsy’s removal and the
subsequent mass killing of Morsy’s supporters by security forces in
August 2013.

The media reports reviewed by Human Rights Watch
corroborated the retroactive referral of hundreds of Minya residents to
military trials for participating in the 2013 violence.

Another military trial involves Sohaib Sa’ad, a 22-year-old man
arrested on a Cairo street on June 1, 2015, as he walked with friends.
The authorities forcibly disappeared Sa’ad for four weeks,
during which time he alleged he was tortured. Sa’ad, who used to film
protests and sell the footage to news media, had been charged in a
prominent case targeting three journalists from Al Jazeera and was
detained from January 2, 2014, until February 12, 2015, when he was
released pending retrial.

On July 10, 2015, almost two weeks after he reappeared, the Defense Ministry published a video
on YouTube announcing the arrest of Sa’ad and others in what it said
was “one of the most dangerous terrorist cells belonging to a special
operations unit of the terrorist Brotherhood organization.” The video
showed Sa’ad and several others confessing their alleged roles in the
group. The court hearing the Al Jazeera case sentenced Sa’ad and the
other defendants to three years in August 2015, and on April 3, 2016,
the military court hearing the terrorism case against Sa’ad and 27 other
defendants postponed its verdict to April 24.

Such mass trials, in both Egypt’s regular and military judiciaries,
have violated due process guarantees and failed to establish individual
guilt. In 2014, a criminal court judge issued 220 death sentences
against defendants accused in mass trials of participating in Minya’s
2013 violence. In February 2016, a military court mistakenly handed down
a life sentence to a 3-year-old child
following a mass trial against 116 protesters from Fayoum governorate,
whose case was transferred to a military court under al-Sisi’s law.

Egypt’s military courts are administered by the Defense Ministry.
The judges are serving military officers. Military court proceedings
typically do not protect basic due process rights or satisfy the
requirements of independence and impartiality of courts of law. Children
can fall under the jurisdiction of military courts, which Human Rights
Watch opposes under any circumstances.

The use of military courts to try civilians violates international
law, including the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights,
which Egypt ratified in 1984. The African Commission on Human and
Peoples’ Rights has stated that civilians should never face military
trial.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations body
charged with interpreting the Convention on the Rights of the Child, has
stressed that “the conduct of criminal proceedings against children
within the military justice system should be avoided.” Egypt ratified
the convention in 1990, making it one of the earliest state parties to
the convention.

“The referral of so many civilians to military courts is an attempt
by Egyptian authorities to provide a judicial rubber stamp for their
crackdown,” Houry said. “But these military trials – often involving
hundreds of civilians at a time – are neither fair nor credible.”

SISI'S MILITARY COURTS LAW

On October 27, 2014 – three days after armed extremists killed dozens
of soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula – al-Sisi, in the absence of a
parliament, decreed Law 136 for the Securing and Protection of Public and Vital Facilities.

The law placed essentially all public property under military
jurisdiction for two years and specifically included electricity
stations, gas pipelines, oil wells, railroads, road networks, and
bridges, in addition to similar state-owned property. To charge
civilians under the law, military prosecutors filed charges
such as blocking road and rail networks, burning electricity
infrastructure or attacking government property, such as telephone
exchanges.

On November 11, 2014, Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat issued a
memo to prosecutors instructing them to review their files for cases
that might fall under the new law, prepare memos about them, and refer
them to military prosecutors “whenever requested.”

Article 204 of Egypt’s Constitution, approved by popular referendum
in January 2014, under the interim government that followed Morsy’s
removal, specifies a range of crimes for which civilians can face
military trial, though it ostensibly limits such cases to assaults on
military personnel or equipment, or crimes that involve military
factories, funds, secrets, or documents.

The article is largely the same
as one in the previous constitution, passed during Morsy’s
administration, which also allowed military courts to try civilians,
despite protests from activists and some politicians.

The wave of military prosecutions against civilians since October
2014 marks a return to the practice, which the authorities employed
widely after Egypt’s 2011 uprising. Between January 28 and August 29,
2011, 11,879 civilians faced military trials,
and at least 8,071 were convicted, according to the Supreme Council of
the Armed Forces, which governed Egypt during most of that period.

Under the rule of Hosni Mubarak, the longtime president ousted in
2011, emergency law allowed him to refer civilians directly to military
trial. Between 1992 and 1998, military courts tried more
than 1,000 civilians in mass trials, most of them alleged members of
al-Jihad or the Islamic Group, extremist Sunni Muslim organizations that
were waging an antigovernment insurgency.

Such trials were rarer during the 2000s and mostly reserved for
sensitive political cases, such as those against members of the
Brotherhood leadership. Military trials of civilians virtually halted
during Morsy’s one-year administration, which began in June 2012, though
the practice remained legal.

Three cases documented by Human Rights Watch show how military
trials under al-Sisi have relied solely on the word of National Security
officers, some of whom are accused by defendants of using torture
during their enforced disappearance to force them to confess.

The
ILO also lambasted the Egyptian authorities for their handling of
investigations into the torture and murder of Italian PhD candidate Giulio Regeni, who was in Egypt researching and writing on the condition of the local independent labor movement prior to his death.

In
a message directed at President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, ILO Director
General Guy Ryder “expressed concern over threats to human and trade
union rights in Egypt,” while calling for clear answers regarding
Regeni’s brutal death.

Ryder also criticized the Egyptian
government’s recent violations against independent unions, including
restrictions on the publication of official documents, prohibiting their
participation in collective bargaining and subjecting independent union
organizers to the risk of layoffs, and even arrests.

“I wish to
stress that it is the responsibility of the [Egyptian] government to
ensure the application of the international labor conventions on freedom
of association that it has freely ratified, and which must be respected
by all state authorities,” Ryder argued.

But officials from the state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) dismissively responded to the ILO’s criticisms.

Maraghi
further called for “the issuing of an official statement to condemn
this intervention into the affairs of Egypt, or any other Arab state.”

As
the UN’s labor agency, the ILO is officially entrusted with overseeing
the implementation of international labor conventions that world states
have voluntarily ratified. According to Ryder, these conventions are
persistently violated in Egypt.

The ILO was established in 1919 —
more than two decades prior to the establishment of the UN — and Egypt
joined in 1936. Since then, Egypt has voluntarily ratified several of its conventions.

However, Friday’s statement claimed that not only does the Egyptian
state fail to enforce the conventions, but appears to actively violate
them.

Ryder pointed to the ILO conventions on freedom of association (Convention 87) and the right to organize (Convention 98), both ratified by Egypt in the 1950s.

The
current administration’s recent actions against Egypt’s independent
trade unions include a lawsuit filed before an administrative court to outlaw and dissolve independent unions and federations, legislative threats against basic union rights from ETUF representatives in Parliament, and the appointment of the new Minister of Manpower
Mohamed Saafan, a senior ETUF chief who largely opposes the
organizational freedoms of unions.

Critics also highlight the absence of
ETUF elections, which are overdue since 2011, Sisi’s presidential
decree to extend the ETUF leadership’s term of office, and the appointment of ETUF chiefs by the ministers of manpower for the past five years.

“For
several years, the International Labor Organization has been calling
upon the government to end discrepancies between existing national
legislation, in particular as regards the Trade Union Act No. 35 of 1976, and ILO Conventions 87 and 98,” Ryder said.

In
contravention to ILO Conventions 87 and 98, Egypt’s trade union law
recognizes the existence of only one trade union federation — the ETUF —
and holds that all labor unions must affiliate themselves to this
state-controlled entity.

The ETUF has held a complete monopoly
over the trade union movement since its formation in 1957. However,
since the 2011 uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak,
independent trade union federations have emerged to challenge its
unilateral control.

Several bills have been presented since 2011
to replace the trade union law which would recognize independent unions
and federations. However, they have repeatedly been shelved by
consecutive governments, and the old union law still remains in
effect.

“Since the International Labor Conference of 2008,
requests have been made to [Egypt] to adopt a new trade union law in
order to ensure full respect for freedom of association rights,” the ILO
statement said.

Since 2008, the ILO had repeatedly placed Egypt on its shortlist of states which violate the organization’s conventions.

“The
government of Egypt has committed that all trade unions in the country,
including the independent trade unions, would be able to exercise their
activities and elect their officers in full freedom in accordance with
Egypt’s international obligations according to ILO Convention 87,
pending the adoption of a new freedom of association law,” the ILO
statement pointed out.

However, ETUF parliamentarians and the new
minister of manpower appear to remain adamant on retaining those
provisions of the trade union law that stipulate the state-controlled
federation’s grip over the labor movement.

The ILO also referred to a previous statement issued by its governing body in March, entitled, “The Threat to Human and Trade Union Rights in Egypt.” The statement referred to “systematic attacks” by the Ministry of Manpower “against independent trade union organizations.”

The
March statement then “expressed outrage about the death of Giulio
Regeni,” who was researching trade unions and freedom of association in
Egypt before he went missing on January 25, the fifth anniversary of the
2011 revolution.His dead body was found on February 3, bearing signs of
torture.

The ILO Workers’ Group earlier called for an independent
inquiry into Regeni’s torture and murder. However, Egyptian authorities
have continued to withhold vital information and communications from Italian prosecutors and investigators.

The
ILO’s director general issued an emphatic call for the Egyptian
government to “expeditiously clarify all the facts surrounding the death
of Mr. Regeni.”

In mid-February, the ETUF issued a statement expressing its “great sorrow for the killing of the Italian student.”

However,
the ETUF statement also dismissed claims that Egyptian security forces
may have been implicated in Regeni’s disappearance and death.

“ETUF
refuses this harsh attack against Egypt conducted by foreign
organizations supported by illegal organizations in Egypt, that try to
manipulate the event to disseminate their poisons to attack stability in
Egypt,” the statement said.

“ETUF is stressing that Egyptian
workers are fully aware of the plots against their country conducted by
foreign or local plotters,” it concluded. “We Egyptian workers are one
front against any illegal organizations' plots.”

CAIRO
(AP) — Egypt has rejected an Italian request to hand over the phone
records of mobile subscribers in the Cairo district where an Italian
doctoral student resided before being abducted, tortured and killed, a
senior Egyptian official said Saturday.

Senior
prosecutor Mustafa Suleiman addressed a news conference a day after
Italy recalled its ambassador to protest what it described as a lack of
cooperation in the investigation of the killing of Giulio Regeni, whose
body was found nine days after he disappeared, bearing signs of torture.

Suleiman
said Egypt rejected the request because it violated Egyptian laws and
the constitution. He said the Italians told an Egyptian delegation
visiting Rome this week that the continuation of cooperation between the
two nations over the case hinged on meeting their request for the
records, which include those of subscribers in the Cairo suburb where
Regeni's body was found Feb. 3.

"Egypt
rejected the request, not because it wanted to be intransigent or to
conceal, but rather out of respect for the law and the Egyptian
constitution," Suleiman said. "That request violates the law and the
constitution and whoever meets it will have committed a crime."

Suleiman
said the Italians repeated the request on the second and final day of
the talks in Rome. "The Egyptian delegation reasserted its
uncompromising rejection," he said.

Regeni,
who was in Egypt to research labor movements, went missing on Jan. 25,
the fifth anniversary of the 2011 uprising, when police were out in
force to prevent demonstrations, leading to speculation that Egyptian
security forces were behind his abduction and death. The Interior
Ministry has denied any involvement.

The
Egyptian government has suggested several alternative scenarios. It
recently claimed that security forces had killed members of a kidnapping
gang in a raid and circulated photos of Regeni's ID cards it said had
been found at the scene. That explanation was widely dismissed,
including in the Italian media, which has closely followed the case.

Suleiman
also said Egyptian investigators could not meet an Italian request for
video footage from security cameras at the metro station nearest to
Regeni's Cairo apartment, saying the recently installed cameras
automatically erased footage. He said the U.S. manufacturers informed
the Egyptian investigators that it was not possible to retrieve the
erased footage. A German company approached by the Egyptians said
retrieval had a 50/50 chance of success but that the procedure was
costly.

"We
met 98 percent of all the requests made by the Italians," Suleiman
said. The Italians, meanwhile, provided the Egyptians with only a small
number of more than 500,000 files stored in Regeni's laptop computer, he
added. The two sides, however, left on good terms, he said.

"Judicial
cooperation between Egypt and Italy is positive and Italy is one of the
best countries that deals with Egypt when it comes to judicial
matters," he said the start of the news conference. "We are eager to
continue this cooperation."

He
refused to be drawn into commenting on media reports on the case,
saying only that anyone who has a "confirmed and documented" piece of
evidence should come forward and submit it to the Egyptian
investigators.

Egyptian
President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said on Tuesday his country deeply
regretted Regeni's death and intended to "transparently" continue its
"full cooperation" with Italy to resolve the case and bring the culprits
to justice.

El-Sissi
and Italian Premier Matteo Renzi have forged close ties since the
Egyptian leader came to office in June 2014. Italy is Egypt's biggest EU
trading partner and the two countries have been coordinating policies
on Libya, Egypt's neighbor and Italy's former colony, where the
extremist Islamic State group has a local affiliate.

Renzi
told reporters on Friday that the decision to recall the Italian
ambassador in Egypt was made "immediately" after Italian prosecutors
gave their assessment of two days of meetings with the Egyptians that
they had hoped would deliver useful evidence.

"Italy,
as you know, made a commitment to the family of Giulio Regeni
naturally, to the memory of Giulio Regeni, but also to the dignity of
all us, saying we'd only stop in front of the truth," Renzi said.

Italian
Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said Saturday that Italy will study
other steps to take if the truth about Regeni's slaying doesn't come
out, without elaborating.

Gentiloni
recalled that he has said "we will adopt immediate and proportional
measures," the Italian news agency ANSA reported from Tokyo, where he
was participating in a G-7 ministers' meeting. "We committed ourselves
to doing this, and we will do this."

Last
week, Regeni's parents urged the Italian government to declare Egypt
"unsafe" for Italians to visit, saying their son was only one of many
torture victims in the Arab nation. Egypt's Red Sea resorts have for
years been a popular destination for hundreds of thousands of Italians
who visited Egypt annually.

Jano Charbel

Egypt still has the most landmines of any country in the world, according to the independent nongovernmental organization the Landmine Struggle Center, with well over 21 million deadly devices hidden in its sands, down from an estimated 23 million.

The
estimated figure includes un-detonated devices that remain concealed or
buried in the earth. The majority are located in the Western Desert and
date back nearly 75 years to World War II.

Egypt is littered with nearly 20 percent of all world’s landmines — globally estimated at 110 million — which continue to claim lives and limbs. The state may still be producing, stockpiling and perhaps even exporting its domestically made landmines to other countries.

To
commemorate the day, International Cooperation Minister Sahar Nasr
launched the “Together for Egypt, Stop Landmines” campaign in Matrouh
Governorate, which has the highest concentration of landmines in the
country. Modest demining efforts are being planned,
while thousands of pamphlets to raise awareness regarding the dangers
of landmines are being distributed among schoolchildren and local
residents.

This year Egypt has received international and private grants amounting to US$17.5 million, according to the state-owned daily newspaper Al-Akhbar
— $12 million of which has been earmarked for mine-detecting equipment,
while the remaining $5.5 million has been allocated to the assistance
of landmine victims and their families.

Over the past few
decades, Egypt has called for international assistance — particularly
from the formerly warring parties of Germany, Italy and the UK — in its
efforts to demine thousands of square kilometers which were littered
with over 17.5 million mines during the World War II battles of
Al-Alamein along Egypt’s border with Libya.

The Foreign Affairs Ministry estimates that
demining efforts from 1981 to the present have succeeded in removing
nearly 3 million landmines, mostly from the Western Desert, thus
reclaiming tens of thousands of hectares of land.

Official
estimates suggest that hundreds have been killed and thousands of others
seriously injured in minefields leftover from World War II, locally
known as “hadayeq al-shaytan” (the devil’s gardens.)

While there are no definitive figures as to how many landmines and victims there are in Egypt, the Foreign Affairs Ministry reports there
have been more than 8,313 documented casualties in the Western Desert
alone since 1982, among both civilians and members of the Armed Forces.
These are reported to include at least 696 fatalities and 7,617 serious
injuries. Real numbers of casualties may be significantly higher, as
many cases are not officially reported.

Mines have also killed and maimed scores of others along Egypt’s eastern border, although these numbers have not been recorded.

Among the most recent victims of landmines included two employees from the Antiquities Ministry who were killed on February 21 while conducting excavations around an archaeological site in the Suez Canal Governorate of Ismailia. A third employee was reportedly injured in this blast.

Apart
from landmines dating to World War II, armed Islamist elements are
currently involved in planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in
the northern Sinai Peninsula targeting police and armed forces.

Al-Akhbar newspaper reported that
on March 21, one farmer was killed and another seriously wounded when
their tractor drove over and detonated a landmine in Rafah near the
border with Gaza and Israel. More recently, on April 2 the privately
owned Al-Tahrir news site reported
that a 9-year-old boy was killed in a landmine explosion in Rafah. A
woman and man were also hospitalized the same day after having been
seriously injured in two separate landmine blasts in the Rafah area.

Beyond
the costly human toll, the presence of old wartime landmines of both
the anti-personnel and anti-tank types continue to render thousands of
kilometers of land unusable for agriculture, infrastructure development
or petroleum and mineral prospecting.

According to the website of the State Information Service,
Egypt faces numerous obstacles in its struggle to demine its lands.
Chief among these obstacles is the very hefty price tag associated with
de-mining. For instance, the clearing of Al-Alamein’s minefields is
estimated to cost a staggering $20 billion.

Other factors
hindering Egypt’s de-mining efforts include the loss or absence of maps
indicating the locations of mines, although the UK has reportedly handed
over maps of its World War II minefields.
There is also the
gargantuan challenge of safely detecting mines that have gradually
shifted over the course of decades — sunk deeper into the earth, covered
by shifting sand dunes or washed away from their original locations.

The
absence of roads leading to these minefields, along with a lack of
mine-detecting equipment, compounds the difficulties associated with
de-mining efforts.

According to the State Information Service site,
several countries have contributed to Egypt’s demining campaigns with
millions of dollars’ worth of funds and mine-detectors, including the
UK, Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the European Union.

The United
Nation’s theme for April 4, 2016 is “Mine action is humanitarian
action, because mine action saves lives.” Other than Egypt, the nations most affected by landmines include Iran, Angola, Afghanistan, Iraq and Cambodia.

As for the UN’s Mine-Ban Convention (Ottawa
Treaty of 1997), to date a total of 162 countries have ratified it.
However, Egypt is among a club of 35 states — including the USA, Russia,
China and Israel — that has neither signed nor ratified the convention.

Citing
security concerns pertaining to cross-border threats of terrorism and
drug smuggling, Egypt continues refuse to join the convention. “Egypt
believes the agreement is deficient, where it made no association
between the disposal by countries of their stockpiles of mines, and the
provision of assistance to countries in clearing mines from their
territories,” said the State Information Service.

However, Egypt’s arguments regarding security concerns ring hollow in light of human rights reports indicating
that it has in previous years and decades produced, stockpiled and even
exported its domestically made landmines to several war-torn states,
including Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, Nicaragua,
Rwanda and Somalia.

Details regarding Egypt’s production and exportation of mines are not made publicly available. However, officials have reportedly informed the UN that Egypt has refrained from producing or exporting anti-personnel landmines since the 1980s.

The Egyptian government returned control of
the Ministry of Manpower to the highly contentious state-controlled
Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) on Monday, reversing progress made in labor rights since the 2011 revolution.

In the government’s recent Cabinet reshuffle, 57-year-old Mohamed Saafan,
formerly vice president of the ETUF and president of its General Union
of Petroleum Workers, replaced Gamal Sorour as minister of manpower. The
appointment comes at a critical time, as Egypt’s independent trade
unions are coming under fire from ETUF representatives in parliament, along with a lawsuit calling for their dissolution and criminalization.

From
March 2011 to March 2016, the ministers of manpower were appointed from
among the ranks of technocrats, independent union organizers and senior
officials in the ministry. The last elections within the ETUF were held
in late 2006, and they have been repeatedly postponed since 2011, when
they were due to take place.

In May 2015, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi issued a decree
extending the terms of office for unelected ETUF officials by one year.
Since 2011, the ministers of manpower have personally appointed the
ETUF's top leaders.

The link between the ETUF and the Ministry of Manpower has often been described as a sort of umbilical relationship
that dates back to the ETUF’s establishment in 1957. This link appears
to have been re-established with the appointment of Saafan.

A recent post on the ETUF’s website
congratulates Saafan on his ministerial post, thanking President Abdel
Fattah al-Sisi for appointing him. “The ministry has returned to its
rightful owners,” it says.
Saafan has issued media statements since his appointment, outlining his ambitious plans and goals for the Ministry of Manpower.

“This
next phase will involve several laws … including the new labor law,
which we need to actualise in order to reach a balance between both
parties in the production process – workers and employers," Safaan said
in a televised interview with the privately-owned LTC satellite channel on March 26.

Unemployment, which is officially at around 13 percent (although
the real unemployment rate may be significantly higher), is another
major issue Safaan plans to address. “We need to cooperate with each
other during this upcoming phase in order to propose ideas with which to
swiftly resolve this problem, and to address it on a long-term basis.
This problem affects the entire Egyptian population and continues to
grow,” he said.

Other issues Safaan says he intends to focus on
are the stalling of production lines and closures related to Egypt’s
struggling textile industry.

But Saafan’s appointment has alarmed many labor activists and independent trade unionists.

Karim
Reda, who was fired from the state-owned gas services and billing
company Petrotrade, tells Mada Masr, “Saafan is the ruling regime’s man
of choice, and I expect the worst violations of labor rights to be
perpetrated while he presides over the ministry.”

“He will likely
interfere in the drafting of new labor legislation, and will do so
against the interests of independent unions, against the right to freely
organize, and in violation of the right to strike,” Reda adds.

Saafan, according to Reda, is likely to issue amendments to the civil service law,
which he says will only serve the interests of the state and not those
of civil servants. He would also, Reda believes, prioritize the rights
of businessmen in making amendments to the unified labor law and seek to
maintain the ETUF as the only legally recognized trade union federation
in Egypt, as stipulated by trade union law.

Indeed, according to a posting
on the General Union for Petroleum Workers’ website last Monday, the
new minister of manpower has reportedly refused to meet with a
delegation of independent trade unionists at the ministry’s
headquarters, as Saafan doesn’t recognize labor unions that are not
affiliated with the ETUF.

Trade union law stipulates that all
labor unions must affiliate themselves with the ETUF, giving them a
monopoly over all trade union activity in Egypt.

Several draft
amendments to the law have been made since 2011, pushing for the
recognition of independent unions and federations in keeping with international legislation, which the Egypt has ratified since the 1950s. But the drafts have never seen the light.

The
ratification of such legislation is in the hands of Parliament, not the
minister of manpower, according to Niazi Mostafa, a lawyer and former
member of the Legislative Committee at the ministry. He explains that a
draft labor law was prepared under Safaan’s predecessor and sent to
parliament for review. “However, it is being redrafted in light of
reservations from businessmen's associations,” Mostafa adds.

Saafan
“is supposed to shed all his prior allegiances upon accepting this
ministerial post. The minister is expected to address the needs of
workers regardless of their unions, or their politics,” Mostafa argues,
adding, “The policies of the new minister have yet to be assessed.”

Others, like Hoda Kamel, an independent union organizer and member of the campaign “Toward a just labor law,”
don’t see Saafan’s appointment holding much hope for labor legislation.
“In terms of the labor law, we have to wait and see what amendments he
makes, but we’re not expecting any genuine labor gains — in terms of
rights or freedoms — during his tenure,” she says, referring to Saafan’s
decision to openly side against striking workers at petroleum
companies.

As president of the General Union for Petroleum Workers, Saafan issued three statements against the most recent Petrotrade strike,
which lasted 45 days — from December 2015 to February 2016. He “claimed
our strike was instigated by revolutionary groups, and that we were
seeking the downfall of the state. He also claimed we were striking
despite earning LE9,000 a month. In fact we earn just LE2,500 a month,
on average. All his claims against us are baseless.”

Saafan has
also been actively involved in acts of union busting, particularly in
relation to the establishment of a local trade union committee for
employees at the state-owned Enppi and Mansoura Petroleum Companies, as
documented by privately owned newspapers Youm7, Al-Masry Al-Youm, and other outlets.

Choosing
to conceal his identity out of fear of retaliation, a worker from the
Mansoura Petroleum Company tells Mada Masr, “We’ve been trying for
nearly four years to establish a union at the company, but both the
company’s administration and the General Union of Petroleum Workers have
been resisting, even though we had sought to establish our union under
the ETUF’s umbrella.”

Protesting petroleum workers have rarely
been able to meet with Saafan. “He’s not one to resolve workers’
grievances,” Reda says. “In fact, he usually ignores our work-related
demands.”